The Most Important Thing To Know About Getting Pregnant

Welcome to Risky Baby Business! In an earlier post, we talked about how high-risk pregnancy offers different mental challenges than a normal pregnancy. Last week we discussed the most important thing to know if you are pregnant.

This week, we’re going to talk about the process of “getting there.” Yes, there are women who think about being pregnant and, boom, it happens. But it sure doesn’t happen like that for most of the women I know. Most of the women I know have to climb Baby Mountain.

Those lucky couples who don’t have to work very hard to conceive have very little concept of what the journey up Baby Mountain is like.

Think about how exhausting it is to claw your way up the same path, month after month, test after test, treatment after treatment. Not only is Baby Mountain stressful (at best) for most women, it is demoralizing and destructive. They begin to feel like less of a woman by having to work so hard at something that seems easy for others.

A lot of high-risk pregnancies start with a whole lot of work. When conception entails work, it’s really hard to keep the romance part of baby-making alive.

Couples who must work hard to get pregnant go through an emotional see-saw of hope and death every month. There is the hope in the back of their minds every time they have sex that this time they scored in the Baby-Making Olympics, then the death of the dream as the woman’s cycle begins.

This is followed by a fresh hope that perhaps this isn’t a real cycle but rather a “spotting cycle,” a fake-out from the body as it begins to grow a baby.

The temperature taking, the ovulation kit buying, the pregnancy testing — and the irrational anger and frustration when none of it works — is hard to describe to someone that who hasn’t been through it.

In this day and age of technology and the illusion of control over our bodies, it is easy to forget that conception is a miracle best allowed to proceed mostly on its own. You can only control the amount of stress you feel about it.

Stress and worry are one of the leading causes of infertility. As hard as it is to do, you must CHILL OUT if you wish to get to the baby-making. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but it will help. If there is no medical reason why you’re not conceiving, the easiest thing to try is this:

Climb off Baby Mountain and have lots of strategic sex.

What is strategic sex, you ask?

• It is the kind of sex that makes a baby! It is a known fact that you get more bang for well, um, your bang if you only have sex every other day.
• It is also a known fact (to the doctors, not to the patients) that fertilization typically happens in the Fallopian tube. 
• Last but not least is the key fact (that I didn’t know when I started up Baby Mountain) – sperm stays alive in the Fallopian tube for an average of 2 days.

That last key point is a pretty big deal and none of the mom’s I spoke with knew this, especially the ones with three kids. I’ve discovered, at least in my circle, that very few third child pregnancies were planned. (Simmer down, third children…I didn’t say unwanted, I said unplanned).

Mother after mother said “we were using the rhythm method” or “we didn’t have sex when I was ovulating.”  Across the board, the majority of the women I spoke with regarding conception who had three children “didn’t know how it happened.”

I know how it happened.

They got their unprotected groove on 1-3 days before they conceived, back in their “safe” time. That sperm was camped out at the top of the Fallopian tube with its catcher’s mitt when their egg popped out for the month. Exactly the way YOU want yours to be.

You don’t want to wait until you ovulate to have baby-making sex, you want to get your fertilizing hanky-panky in BEFORE you ovulate.

Ideally, your schedule should look like this:

Day 1: Stupendous hang-from-the-rafters sex
Day 2: Everyone recovers and thinks about doing it again
Day 3: First day of potential ovulation / More baby-making sex
Day 4: Think happy thoughts
Day 5: Repeat

With the above schedule, whether you ovulate early, on time or a day late, your partner’s sperm are in place, lined up with their catcher’s mitts to penetrate that egg and get to baby growing.

One of the advantages to focusing on having stupendous hang-from-the-rafters sex is that it produces happy, relaxed chemicals in the baby incubator (that’s you, Mom). Happy incubators have been proven to make more babies than stressed out, obsessing, rabid temperature-taking incubators.

You keep hearing about lowering your stress levels here at Risky Baby Business, and with good reason. If you lower your stress, you raise your chances of making a baby. It’s just that simple.

Did you know about the baby-making schedule? Do you have any conception “secrets” you’d like to share?

Jenny

OPPORTUNITY:

Doron Ofir Casting is looking for expectant mothers in their second trimester for a new documentary series about the journey to motherhood in the city of Los Angeles. 

This new series celebrates the adventure from your point of view. Take us on your journey through the sometimes irrational, decidedly demanding, high maintenance wonderment of pregnancy. Share the miracle of your body taking you to places you never thought it would; the lower back pains, mood swings, cravings, exhaustion and new-found appetites. 

If you are at the end of your first or into your second trimester and within 40 miles of the greater Los Angeles area, you could be eligible to star in a new exciting series that celebrates the roller coaster ride of pregnancy. Email lamoms2b@gmail.com or click here for more information.